Once known for her wild style, bisexual husband and outrageous parties, the
'Princess TnT' has put it all behind her – and turned the family's
debts into a huge success

It is 11am and I am waiting at the Princess’s kitchen table at Schloss St Emmeram in Regensburg, Germany. Also waiting is the Princess’s breakfast, to my right – a bowl of blueberries under a monogrammed linen napkin, a carrot juice, yogurt, a second napkin in a silver holder engraved with a G and a crown. Against one wall is a Wurlitzer. Against another is a sideboard with a large spherical glass vase full of several dozen small flesh-coloured plastic foetuses.

Gloria, Princess von Thurn und Taxis has made a career out of entrances. “Princess TNT, the dynamite socialite” and “punk princess”, as she was known in the 1980s, was famous for her parties, her outfits, the kaleidoscope colour changes of her mohawk hair. At her 25th birthday party at a New York club she danced on tables in a Paco Rabanne chainmail dress said to have cost £18,000. Today she eventually appears wearing tennis gear, which, together with her sensible hair and sensible glasses, makes her look more like an off-duty bank manager than the head of one of the grandest, and most eccentric, aristocratic families in Europe. Yet even if sartorially subdued, the Princess remains, it is immediately apparent, a force to be reckoned with. She is both friendly and formidable. How would she like to be addressed? “Princess,” she tells me firmly.

That virtuous breakfast provides a clue to her changed appearance. “I still like fashion,” says the 54-year-old widow, “but I am not addicted to it now. I don’t have the figure. I weigh at least 20 kilos more. I stopped smoking, and now the only way is up, never down!” What would her 25-year-old self say if she could see her now? “Boring! Nothing to write home about! But I try to dress my age, to be an elegant lady, not a fashion icon.”

Gloria at a ball in 1989, at the height of her 'Princess TnT' days (WIREIMAGE)

The passion that remains is art. “For me art is a life enhancer. When I first started to collect I was friends with Keith Haring, Andy Warhol… and I started to visit studios, and that was interesting, but most of all it was FUN. My husband gave me a budget so I could buy what I liked, and you become dependent – every time you see something you really like, you want to have it. That is how art collecting works: you start with one thing and end up with hundreds. It is addictive.”

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The evidence of her addiction is everywhere: in the vast stairwell in her apartment, for example, is a Chapman brothers sculpture of a tree hung with flayed corpses, a Hirst butterfly painting, photographs by Cindy Sherman and Andreas Gursky, and two portraits of the Princess, one by her friend Julian Schnabel, the other by Andy Warhol.

Recently the Princess herself has begun to paint. “I have a favourite niece, she is handicapped, and we draw together, and I always drew her face, and her mother said that I was doing her so well, could I do other people? So I started and they had – how do you say it? – a recognisability.” She had a show of her work in New York this summer – a series of endearingly naif and, yes, largely identifiable portraits of former famous residents of the Chelsea Hotel, from Bob Dylan to Marilyn Monroe. “My latest passion has astonished a lot of people. But I always come up with surprises.”

Indeed. Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, portraitist, is only the latest of her many incarnations. She started out in life poor but aristocratic, her father an impoverished German nobleman, her mother a dispossessed Hungarian countess. At school her nickname was Pummel (pudgy). As a teenager she developed vague ambitions to be an actress and then, at the age of 19, on a night out in Munich, she met a distant cousin, 33 years older than her, and the stage – her stage – was set.

Gloria with her late husband Prince Johannes in 1990 (REX)

“I knew instantly, but I didn’t dare think it, because it was so far away from me. I had never met anyone so fascinating. I was happy to meet him for lunch, dinner, lunch, dinner. Then he invited me to come here. I knew his name was Prince von Thurn und Taxis, but I didn’t know who he was really. I had no clue what his house looked like. But when I came here, I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, this is really something else.’ I was not aware that he was interested. But he was looking at me carefully. And I was enjoying the ride.”

And what a ride. “Here” was a castle with 500 rooms which, she once said, “makes Buckingham Palace look like a hut”. And the billionaire Prince Johannes, one of Germany’s richest men, also happened to be openly, extravagantly bisexual. (A fellow Bavarian noble accredited him with “some highly unusual tastes”.) He was a handful in other ways, too: on one occasion he bit a woman’s finger when she put it near his face. An acquaintance once observed, “He didn’t really like anyone.”

That said, the Princess was obviously smitten: talking about their courtship now, more than three decades later, she becomes almost girlish, scrunching her face in assorted expressions of mortified delight. Weeks after they met he invited her to accompany him to South America. “I was supposed to go to school but I decided I’d much rather travel so I told him I was coming with him [scrunch]. He was very happy [scrunch]. On that trip I really fell in love with him [scrunch]. He said, ‘Look, I would like to have children with you, would you like that?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I would really like that’ [scrunch]. ‘Well, that is very good common grounds to get married,’ he said.”

From this account at least the Prince’s motivations sound suspiciously practical. Certainly observers at the time said that he needed an heir for his fortune, which originated from the founding of Europe’s postal system in the 15th century, and that Gloria was the bluest blood then on his books. Why does she think he proposed to her? “He explained to me later that he needed someone healthy and fresh who could give him joy and an energy boost, but that he also needed good blood.” Good blood? “From a healthy family.” From an aristocratic family? “Yes, aristocratic, with pedigree. Like horses. When you want good horses you have to see that you have good breeding. He knew my family. He knew this was good stock.”

Gloria in the Max Greger Big Band, 1988 (GETTY)

She was 20 when they wed; she wore Valentino, and Marie Antoinette’s diamond diadem. Their first child – a daughter – was born six months later. And so began the whirlwind... The travel. “January, Rio… February and March, St Moritz… April, London… May, Paris… June until August, a boat in the South of France… September, New York…” The fashion. Thierry Mugler, Claude Montana, lots of Paco Rabanne, all accessorised with the best a princely jewel collection could offer and coiffures that at their loftiest reputedly hit 80cm. “It was a kick to see the reaction you would get from your outfits. All this disguise was a lot of fun.”

There was other attention-grabbing behaviour too. Gloria rode her four Harley-Davidson motorbikes, hung out with Prince the popstar and with hookers in Hamburg, was arrested at an airport for possession of marijuana (planted, she claimed), did a barking-dog impression live on American television.

And, über alles, the parties. Most Gatsby-esque of all was the Prince’s 60th, “The Ball of the Century”, a three-day affair in 1986. The dress code was 18th-century, complete with powdered wigs, the cake decorated with 60 marzipan phalluses. Gloria, dressed as Marie Antoinette, descended into the high-level throng – Mick Jagger, Gunter Sachs, the Maharaja of Baroda – on a gilded cloud, and sang “Happy birthday, Johnny” in the style of Marilyn Monroe, accompanied by the Munich opera.

“I was a spoiled brat,” Gloria was to observe later. “My only responsibility was to entertain Johannes… and look after his children.” Her friend Countess Marina Cicogna put it differently. “At a young age, Gloria found herself married to an overpowering figure. She moulded herself for Johannes. She had to be as outrageous as he was, because that was what he liked. Another young woman would have been crushed, but she wasn’t. She’s a more serious, bright, together person than she appeared to be when Johannes was alive.”

Gloria with her son, Prince Albert, and her daughters, Princesses Elisabeth and Maria Theresia, in 2003 (REX)

Because in 1990, after 10 years, and three children (one of them, Albert, the desired male heir), Johannes died, leaving debts and inheritance tax totalling £300 million. The stage was set for another Gloria. Only months before his death Johannes had told a newspaper, “It is very difficult for my wife to make decisions of a business nature because she has never learnt to do it.” Initially, during the months of complex financial negotiation with the family’s management team – away from the cameras and the couture – it seemed that he was right. Insiders at the time described her as quiet, even “mousy”. Here, after all, was someone who hadn’t finished school. But gradually she took control and, through shrewd investing and divesting, spectacularly transformed debt into profit, thereby safeguarding her son’s inheritance, in whose interests she was acting. (Prince Albert inherited at 18 – he is now 31 – but asked his mother to run the business in his name.)

“I never knew I could be a businesswoman,” she says. “My job was to be a mother, a wife, to entertain my husband and my guests. But it was not so difficult. Running an enterprise is like running a household. The family is a mini-business with lots of the same challenges.”

Today she runs a large part of the castle as a business: the most historically significant rooms are open to the public, and there are offices in situ elsewhere; there is also an events calendar, stretching from a summer festival to a Christmas market. She is well aware of the power of the Gloria brand – “the crazy woman who used to have the crazy hair” – and the part it plays in pulling in the punters. “People can only come and visit something that they have heard of.”

How does she feel about her ongoing fame in Germany? “Yes, people look at me. But it is nice to be a celebrity. And in Regensburg having a prince knocking around is quite normal.” She has certainly earned the respect of the local community, running a daily soup kitchen that provides 300 lunches for the poor. Her Catholicism – “Even when I was going to Studio 54 I was still attending church, maybe just not the early Mass” – has become an increasingly big part of her existence. The woman whose married existence appeared to have had a certain symbiosis with that of “L’Autrichienne” seems to have left her let-them-eat-cake days largely behind her. That said, she still lives the high life, with homes in New York, Rome, Kenya and the Bavarian countryside. And she is still capable of controversy, most notably when she claimed in 2001 that Africa has a high incidence of Aids because “blacks like to copulate a lot”, a statement that today she says was taken out of context.

How important is money to her? “It is important, because it can buy liberty, but it is not all that matters. Yet I am in a privileged situation where I can say this because I have enough to have a very comfortable life. When the family almost went broke… in those times you realise how important money is and how careful you have to be with it. You cannot throw it out the window.”

What would her life have been like if she hadn’t married into punk princessdom? “That is very difficult for me to imagine. But I am very grateful, and I include that in my prayers every day. Because if I did not get married I would have had to have an everyday job, and my life would have been extremely boring, or more boring than it is today.” Impossible to argue with that.